According to a later foundation narrative, the now-ruined Cistercian abbey of Bégard, rather untypically sited on an exposed hill-side in north-central Brittany, was established in 1130 by four monks from the Norman abbey of L'Aumône. Looking for somewhere to build a new house they had first consulted Baudri, archbishop of Dol, then Geoffrey, son of Count Stephen, a cadet of the ducal house of Brittany. It was Stephen who gave them land at Pluscoat in the Goëlo, a wooded region lying west and north of the bay of Saint-Brieuc. Here Raoul the Beggar had already built a hermitage, which later gave its name to the abbey (no. 1). As Claude Evans shows in the introduction to this excellent edition of all the main surviving documents relating to the abbey and its dependencies down to 1476, including its English priory at Begar, near Moulton in North Yorkshire, this account requires serious revision. No twelfth-century charter links Bégard directly with the Cistercians, although it later attracted patronage from Duke Conan iv (1153–71), who confirmed grants made in England by his father, Earl Alan the Black of Richmond (1135×1146), as well as benefactions from Count Stephen's grandson, Count Alan of Goëlo. However, from the early thirteenth century, Bégard's membership of the Cistercian order is clearly documented and, besides great nobles, the Breton gentry began endowing it generously with lands and other rights. By John's reign it was also taking tithes on the fairs at Boston, Lincolnshire (nos 19–22). In all some 272 items are listed, including now lost charters, unevenly spread, with only ten or eleven for the twelfth century, forty for the thirteenth, and around two-thirds from post-1350, a figure boosted by nearly fifty entries taken from English chancery rolls. The majority of surviving originals and copies (ninety-nine) are now in the Archives départementales des Côtes-d'Armor. The rest are scattered between the Vatican, three other French and five English repositories, including Eton College, which eventually acquired Begar priory from Henry vi. Only a small proportion have been previously published. Thus with its succinct discussion of the religious, social and economic development of the abbey (no. 73 provides rare evidence for the impact of the Black Death on Brittany), as well as its careful analysis of the diplomatic and language of the charters (Latin and French), critical annotation and a detailed index, paying particular regard to toponymics and personal names largely deriving from an area which was Breton-speaking when most charters were redacted, this edition makes readily available a wealth of evidence for the growth of a middle-ranking Cistercian house (probably housing around twenty monks at its peak). More unusually, it also documents the fortunes of its English dependency, considered an alien priory from the late thirteenth century.